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Warning: This post contains spoilers for the premiere of True Detective: Night Country.

A severed tongue. Vanishing scientists. Perpetual night. In the True Detective Season 4 premiere, all these things play a role in the mystery at the heart of the latest chapter of HBO’s acclaimed crime anthology series.

Subtitled Night Country, Season 4 is the first entry in the franchise to be helmed by a showrunner other than series creator Nic Pizzolatto. It’s also being touted as a return to form for the show. “[I]n many ways, [Season 4] feels closer than ever before to the anthology’s blockbuster debut,” wrote TIME TV critic Judy Berman. “But this fourth installment, premiering Jan. 14 after a five-year hiatus, is also a reinvention, a reawakening, maybe even a rejoinder to everything that preceded it.”

Directed by Mexican filmmaker Issa López (Tigers Are Not Afraid), who also wrote or co-wrote all six episodes, Season 4 takes the traditional neo-noir formula of True Detective and puts a new spin on it. The story takes place in Ennis, Alaska, a fictional mining town 150 miles north of the Arctic …

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Helldivers 2 players completed what I can only describe as their first real-life Major Order over the weekend. After Sony revealed that it would be going ahead with its initial plans to require the monstrously popular co-op shooter’s Steam players to link themselves to a PSN account, an uproar of furious divers retaliated with military coordination.

The major thorn for most players? The requirement would shut out around 177 countries unable to make a PSN account under this returning rule of law. Over 200 thousand negative reviews later, Sony backed down. Cue the fist-bumps, the chest-bumps, and the hoo-rahs. It’s a vindication of one certain community manager’s suggestion to make their upset known via a 500kg review bomb—one that ‘almost, but not quite’ had them fired. 

But when you drop a bomb, you’re left with rubble. While I’m sure the many screengrabs of red lines circulating the internet—threatening one of Sony’s biggest PC wins ever—absolutely contributed to the reversal, they also left a red mark on the game’s review score. 

However at the time of writing, its “Overall” review score is now Mostly Positive, while its “…

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Baldur’s Gate 3’s Patch 7 deputized a well-liked side character, the Tiefling bard Alfira, to full companion status. The only problem is that it’s only temporary, and in the most “cursed monkey’s paw” way imaginable. Cenalexis_01 on the Baldur’s Gate 3 subreddit figured out how to make it permanent, though, and the exploit requires the sort of obscene, beautiful abuse of Baldur’s Gate 3’s open-ended systems I’ve come to relish seeing. Spoilers ahead for the Dark Urge origin.

One of the defining scenes of BG3’s Dark Urge (Durge to their friends) origin is their unwilling murder of Alfira. Partway through Act 1, she’ll show up to your camp during a long rest and the Durge will unavoidably kill her⁠—though it is possible, through shenanigans, to make stand-in Quil Grootslang show up and take the fall instead. Patch 7 made it so that Alfira even joins your party and can be leveled up for a brief window, sparking some hope she was a surprise new companion added in the patch, but no dice: It was just meant to twist the knife a bit more.

But as cenalexis_01 has demonstrated, you can have Alfira as a full companion if you really want, it just e…

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If you saw the season two finale of hit Adult Swim cartoon Smiling Friends last week, you could make out in the lower-right corner, taking up a generous 4% of the screen, the distinctive quadruple back buttons of the Steam Deck being slapped by the fingerless hands of supporting character Glep, a 1,695-year-old frog guy, reclined in a bean bag chair.

An official Valve gaming handheld, clearly visible for eight seconds of an 11-minute cartoon? Truly, this was the moment PC gaming became mainstream.

OK, no, this was not the dawning moment of cultural acceptance of our decades-old hobby, which you could reasonably argue is the first and oldest gaming platform. By my count, PC gaming has enjoyed mainstream visibility on par with its console counterparts arguably as far back as 2017 or 2018, when the generation that grew up on Minecraft reached ages that made it a perfect audience for games deeply steeped in the spirit of PC gaming. (Also, technically, Smiling Friends referenced PC gaming a whole year earlier last season when it showed us a depressed Satan spending time playing Rust and hanging out on Discord. Relatable, Satan.)

If mainstrea…

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You’d think running a seaside sushi restaurant would be a relaxing, low-stress experience, but despite the chill tropical vibes in Dave the Diver there’s also quite a lot of pulse-pounding action. Just because he’s working at a vacation destination doesn’t mean his life is smooth sailing, and along with reef sharks and angry crabs nipping at his flippered feet, Dave often has to go head-to-head with fearsome boss monsters in the briny depths.

There are about a dozen boss fights in Dave the Diver and a big selection of underwater monsters to battle, like a giant squid, an eel the size of a subway train, and even a prehistoric reptile. Taking them on usually means fighting with something other than your standard fishing equipment.

But according to Dave the Diver’s game director, Jaeho Hwang, even if you’ve battled your way through every boss in the game, you haven’t seen the last of one particular boss who may be making a return appearance in the future.

Via email, I asked Hwang about Dave the Diver’s boss monsters, and if there were any boss fights they didn’t get to include in the game that they really wanted to.

“There is a Hermit Crab boss in t…

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Baldur’s Gate 3 has a lot of words—and even ‘a lot of words’ is a major understatement. In a Steam post before the game’s release, it was revealed the game’s total script is about 2 million words long. For context, all five books in the current Game of Thrones series add up to about 1.7 million words. Big. It’s a big game.

Which is why I was pretty damn impressed to find this tool casually popping up on the game’s subreddit, able to show which character had the most changes to their dialogue since launch. It’s Wyll, which is interesting—but not a huge surprise, seeing as his story stands the most to gain from some added nattering (we still like him, though). Still, I wanted to know how the heck something like this was built, so I reached out to the tool’s creator.

Total amount of changes & added lines per character from r/BaldursGate3

They go by the name of Invuska on Reddit, GitHub, the Larian Forums and Discord, and they credit the BG3 Patch Dialogue Difference Tool’s existence to a shared effort by other modders in the community. “The extractor (by Norbyte), multi-tool (ShinyHobo…

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Skyrim mods are their own universe at this point. There’s modding, and then there’s Creation Engine modding. Even in the wake of full multiplayer mods and ChatGPT-powered companions, we at PC Gamer can’t help but love the smaller, hyper specific changes some modders make, like Kabu’s Really Gourd Plant Replacer.

“Assortment of high poly mesh and texture replacers for gourds using 3d-scanned real gourds,” the author writes. “Finally a sorely-needed full overhaul of the gourd plant!” The attention to detail here really is staggering. There’s a single harvestable “gourd” item in the base game, but Kabu has taken the liberty of diversifying the gourd population, with instances of delicata squash, butternut squash, elongated pumpkin, and zucchini all behaving mechanically identical to the generic gourd of yore.

Kabu sourced high quality free models made from 3D scans of the respective gourds, and has included an installer for getting the project working with various mod configurations. I really can’t get enough of this sort of mod and its heroic dedication to perfecting the minutiae of Bethesda’s janky worlds. See also johnskyrim’s rugs that can get messy and tri…

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When it comes to the affordable end of pre-built gaming PCs, I’m usually expecting to make some sort of sacrifice for a good deal. Be that a tiny boot drive, 8GB of RAM, or a pitiful PSU. Well, you don’t have to do that here. This Yeyian Yumi PC from Newegg checks a lot of boxes for under $850, and comes from our current favorite budget PC builder.

For starters, it’s powered by Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4060. A solid 1080p GPU, and the cheapest way to score Nvidia DLSS and Frame Gen support, admittedly we would love if this card were a little cheaper. That said, this build doesn’t charge too dearly for the privilege. 

I wish I could say this is an entirely current-gen PC build, but it’s using an Intel Core i5 12400F—that’s almost two generations old by now. Still, it’s a great gaming chip that we loved on team, and it’ll pair perfectly with that graphics card. 

• We’re curating all the best Black Friday PC gaming deals right here.

The good thing about this build is that, if you felt like an upgrade, you could bump that CPU to a much more modern Intel chip without swa…

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Update: Plex has sent me a statement which argues the system is, in fact, “opt-in”. Looking into the situation further, I observed enough issues with the system’s integration (and the community response to those justifications) that I felt it warranted its own news post, which you can read by following that link.

In the interest of fairness I’ve edited the headline to reflect the ambiguity of the situation by putting “opt-out” in quotes. Given this whole thing’s a mess, I’ll leave it up to your judgement as to whether it counts.

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There comes a time in every app, website, or even game’s life where it works about as well as it should. Unfortunately, due to the way society is, the question then asked is: ‘how do we make more money?’ We’ve all seen it. Weird bells and whistles added to perfectly functioning services that take away more than they add.

History has repeated itself with Plex, a streaming app that lets you build your own Netflix, in a sense. Plex allows users to construct their own libraries, either collecting stuff from free streaming services, or creating their own “media servers” with whatever content you’ve got the files for. T…

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Baldur’s Gate 3’s Dark Urge is a major highlight of the story—putting the player character in the role of a barely-composed murderer with the choice to either lean into, or away from, the urge to slaughter.

Chief among the Dark Urge’s accomplishments is how it’s consistently gross with its narration, often managing to be both off-putting and just visceral enough to let your imagination do the rest of the mauling. Imagine my surprise when, reading through Eurogamer’s interview with the Dark Urge storyline’s lead writer, I discovered the Dark Urge’s writer wasn’t a fan of gore at all.

Baudelaire Welch was selected for the role by Swen Vincke himself because their “mother worked partially on the script for Silence of the Lambs, the movie”, they explain. “I think Swen got that in his mind a little bit like, ‘You’ll be good at this’.” As the interview reveals, however, Welch is a self-described “squeamish” individual (many sympathies, I can’t make it through horror movies myself) and, hilariously, that they “hate gore!”

Writing director Adam Smith, however, maintains that was exactly the point: “When you get somebody who is really into gore and horror…

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Looks like Diablo 4 has Diablo 2’s most powerful hat, as Blizzard has now confirmed a Harlequin Crest drop in the new action RPG. Harlequin Crest may not be a name that means much to you if you didn’t play hundreds of hours of Diablo 2 or Diablo 2 Resurrected, but the unique hat—called Shako by veterans for the class of items it was based on—was a staple of nearly any powerful build. Blizzard’s global community development director for Diablo, Adam Fletcher, confirmed the drop of a Harlequin Crest for Korean players via Twitter: “Can confirm they do indeed have a Harlequin Crest :),” he said.

That legacy will probably live on, as reported by wowhead, because the Diablo 4 Harlequin Crest is a beast. It’s got a bonus to everything every class build wants: life, resource generation, every single stat, cooldown reduction, damage reduction, and a whopping +4 Ranks to all your skills.

How do you get a Harlequin Crest in Diablo 4? That much isn’t 100% clear, for now, but the current thinking is that—wherever it shows up—it’s not going to drop until you’re over level 90, whether it drops in nightmare dungeons or well into the game’s final reaches.

…

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Last year, Microsoft disclosed that a Chinese hacking group referred to as “Storm-0558” was responsible for a security breach that led to the access of the email accounts of around 25 organisations, including some US government agencies. The federal Cyber Safety Review Board has just released its report on the incident, identifying a “cascade of Microsoft’s avoidable errors that allowed this intrusion to succeed”. Ouch.

The Cyber Safety Review Board is composed of multiple officials from several US government departments including the Department of Homeland Security, the NSA and the FBI (via Ars Technica) and several industry leaders, and was tasked with creating the report [pdf] under a mandate from President Biden in response to the attack. 

In a somewhat scathing review, the board found that not only were Microsoft’s security practices “lacking” in comparison to other cloud providers, but that public statements released surrounding the attack were “inaccurate” and not corrected in a timely manner. 

Microsoft said at the time that a consumer signing key was acquired by Storm-0558 which was used to forge tokens for the cloud service that stores login…

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After pulling off a Darktide redemption arc last year, Fatshark’s not resting on its inquisitorial laurels. Secrets of the Machine God, Darktide’s latest update, arrived earlier today, bringing a new mission to revive an abandoned Adeptus Mechanicus foundry and a set of new weapon types. If you’re not already thrilled, you should be: It’s never a bad time when the tech-priests are around.

The new mission, Clandestium Gloriana, will have strike teams descend into a derelict “Foundryplex”—a massive production facility where the AdMech tech-priests once worked their fabled wonders, which the Inquisition hopes to reawaken for its war effort. The mission will feature some new tech from Fatshark, like a mission-giver who will accompany the players and a variable end-of-mission encounter that aims to improve replayability. And it’s an arctic mission! Everyone loves an arctic mission.

As a reward for their efforts, conscripts will be able to enjoy the spoils of the Foundryplex in the form of new weapon types. For Ogryn characters, new two-handed pickaxes can puncture skulls and sweep crowds, depending on the variety. It’ll be like you’re playing Deep Rock Galact…

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Stardew Valley’s 1.6 update was supposed to be a relatively small thing, intended primarily to make life easier for modders rather than approaching the size of the feature-packed 1.5 update that once seemed like it would be Stardew Valley’s send-off. 1.6 has grown significantly in scope since then, to include things like “a major new festival,” new late-game content, new items and crafting recipes, and support for eight-person multiplayer on Steam. But now creator Eric Barone has teased what is undoubtedly the most important part of the update, and it can be summed up in five words: “Hats on cats.”

“(And dogs.)”

The tease was delivered with Barone’s traditional Twitter simplicity: An image of two cats and two dogs, all festooned in various sorts of tasteful headgear. “Hats on cats (and dogs),” Barone wrote. And that’s it.

Of course, that was all that was needed to set the hearts of Stardew fans aflutter. “This is the greatest moment in gaming history,” facial6lock tweeted. Another, plain_cheeri0s, shared similar sentiments, tweeting, “This is life changing.” And they weren’t alone in that feeling: “Not to be dramatic but this just changed my life,” vixella wrot…

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NASA has demonstrated a successful transmission of a high-definition video from a probe over 30 million kilometres away in space. Instead of using the traditional method of radio waves, the system onboard asteroid-probe Psyche utilises a powerful near-infrared laser beam. Rather than showing us the unnerving splendour of the empty void, engineers chose a 15-second clip of Taters: An orange cat, chasing a red laser dot about a couch.

No, I haven’t made this up. Our office team spotted the news on CNN and having gone through all of NASA’s pages on the craft Psyche and its mission details, I can confirm that it’s all 100% true: Taters is now a space legend.

Deep space probes routinely send data back to Earth, providing information on the craft’s status and results from any specific experiments taking place. Normally, this is all done via a beam of radio waves, because it doesn’t require a huge amount of power and the transmission is far less likely to suffer from interference.

However, radio beams are somewhat limited concerning how much data can be transmitted every second. The latest missions use every possible trick and algorithm to maximise the amount of data …

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If you ever wondered why PCG keeps inviting me, the heathen Katie Wickens, back for Prime Day deal shenanigans you’ll find it’s entirely based around my knack for finding the weirdest deals imaginable.

Every time Prime Day rolls around, my old boss asks me to (and I quote) “unleash the beast”. Because he knows that somewhere in the annuls of Amazon’s many overstuffed warehouses lurks a cache of perfectly peculiar ephemera, worthy of only the most discerning freaks of nature. That’s us—well mostly it’s me. And that’s why I get paid the big bucks (I don’t).

• We’re curating the best Prime Day PC gaming deals right here.

Alright, you’re here for the weird stuff so lets talk deals. If you’re after some tasty snaccs [sic], memerific presents for your pals, or some creepy-ass decor to really set off your gaming battlestation, the list below will have something to light up your creepy little gamer life. Just know that while I am here rounding up the strangest Prime Day deals, I’m not necessarily suggesting you spend actual money on them.

Unless you want to, that is. 

Hey, this…

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The US government has announced it will hand $6.4B to Samsung, in a bid to get more advanced chips produced on US soil. The company, headquartered in South Korea, is currently in the process of building chipmaking facilities, including a fab and packaging plant, in Taylor, Texas and this big influx of cash hopes to convince it to stay in the Lone Star State for the long-term.

“The chips that Samsung will be making in Texas are important components to our most advanced technologies, from artificial intelligence to high-performance computing and 5G communications,” Gina Raimondo, US Secretary of Commerce, said. “With President Biden’s leadership and Samsung’s commitment to the US, this proposed funding advances America’s leadership in semiconductor manufacturing on the world stage.”

The money promised to the South Korean tech giant will part-fund two new cutting-edge fabs, an R&D fab, and an advanced packaging facility in Texas. All of which will join forces with the company’s existing facility outside of Austin. The two fabs will focus on 4nm and 2nm process nodes, which will see the new Samsung facilities competing with TSMC and Intel for tiny, effici…

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Overcome every problem today’s Wordle could possibly throw your way with our help. Keep on scrolling and you’ll find great tips that’ll help make your opening guess work its hardest for you, as well as a clue written just for today’s game and, if you get really stuck, the answer to the December 9 (903) puzzle.

A single letter tripped me up, and that meant today’s Wordle shamefully took one guess more than it otherwise could have. That’s not ideal, but it’s still much better than staring at my screen for ten minutes the way I do some days, wondering why the English language has decided to get up and leave me for the duration of a Wordle session.

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Saturday, December 9

A slight change in position or direction could be described using today’s answer, as could going up or down gears in a car. Also, someone working until 4am would be working the night _____. 

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Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

No letters are used twice in today’s puzzle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

If there’s one thing better than playing Wo…

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